Recent advances in telecommunications networks have drastically altered the manner in which people interact and conduct business. These advances promote efficiency and convenience in one's ability to receive important information. With this in mind, individuals and businesses today find that their physical and electronic addresses are changing faster than ever with increased mobility and competing message delivery services. Deregulation and privatization of the global postal systems, competing package delivery services, and rapid growth of multiple competing electronic mail (e-mail) systems are creating an environment in which there is no single point of contact for address correction as there was when the sole messaging provider was the national postal service.
Users who enjoy the benefit of sending and receiving e-mail messages typically subscribe to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) offering such e-mail capabilities (e.g., America Online (AOL), Netcom, and Redconnect) and/or may subscribe to an internet based e-mail service (e.g., juno, rocketmail, yahoo) which each is associated with a particular e-mail address. Thus, the e-mail address is unique to the e-mail service provider. The uniqueness of an address to a selected provider is often apparent on the face of the address, e.g., DQuine@aol.com, Quine@juno.com or DouglasQuine@yahoo.com. A user or subscriber to a particular e-mail service may from time to time desire or need to change service providers (e.g., from DQuine@aol.com to QuineDo@pb.com). Exemplary motivation for these changes may derive from the fact that an alternative service provider charges lower rates, or the existing provider's inability to upgrade its service.
A user who desires to change from one e-mail service provider to another suddenly faces the reality of being bound to the old service provider because the user's address is unique to that one provider. A sudden and complete changeover is in many circumstances impossible because the community of people who wish to send electronic messages to the user are only aware that the old address exists. For example, an e-mail address may be published in an industry directory that is only published once every year or two years. Alternatively, the e-mail address may be printed on a business card which cannot be retracted and corrected. Thus, the user incurs a potentially significant loss of prospective business by abandoning the old address.
Currently, there is no effective means in place for address correction of e-mail addresses. Even if the e-mail sender is highly diligent, there are no resources or processes available to identify corrected electronic address information. The problem is further accentuated by the fact that extreme competition in internet service providers, and likewise e-mail service providers, results in extremely high obsolesce of e-mail addresses with no means for e-mail forwarding (e.g., closing an AOL e-mail account provides no option for forwarding e-mail intended for that account to a new e-mail address).
Further, today's web savvy users may have multiple e-mail addresses which periodically change as new features develop or are lost. Entire domain names can be lost (e.g., lostdomain.com) and all mail directed there may be lost as well. In either case, typically the MAIL DAEMON message is returned to the sender, notifying the sender that the e-mail address cannot be found and e-mail message is being returned to the sender.
Some service providers offer their user-subscribers the option of a message forwarding service. These forwarding services operate by receiving the incoming message, retrieving the portion of the incoming message that identifies a selected user who subscribes to the forwarding service, associating the selected user with a forwarding address through the use of a lookup table, and transmitting the message to the forwarding address. The forwarding services differ from the normal message delivery service that the central service provider offers because a portion of the forwarding address belongs to another central service provider. Thus, the forwarded message is actually delivered to its intended recipient by the other or second service provider, i.e., the forwarded message passes through two central service providers, as opposed to just one provider. The intended message recipient is free to change the second provider with regularity provided that the recipient always informs the forwarding service of each change in the second provider. However, this message forwarding system only works with viable e-mail address, that is, the e-mail address associated with the first service provider must still be active and not obsolete. In fact, few e-mail services offer forwarding services and few, if any, offer to forward e-mail after the account is closed. Otherwise, the first service provider is only enabled to send the later mentioned MAIL DAEMON message back to the original sender of the e-mail message.